Karpathy Joins Anthropic, China Ships Another Price Cut, Anthropic's SpaceX Bill - This Week In AI
Shane and Abhi are back with AI news! Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic. The OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI head said he wants to "get back to R&D" at the LLM frontier. Same week, Greg Brockman posted "the model alone is no longer the product." Elon Musk announced SpaceX is offering AI compute as a service at significant scale, with Anthropic as the flagship customer. Tom Brown confirmed Anthropic is scaling on GB200 capacity in Colossus 2 through June. Anthropic is reportedly paying SpaceX $1.25B a month — a $15B run rate to one vendor. OpenAI offered $2M in tokens to every YC startup in the current batch in exchange for equity. WorkOS launched auth.md, an open protocol for agents to register for services on the web, with Cloudflare and Firecrawl as launch partners. The Chinese labs kept pushing. DeepSeek made their 75% discount permanent on V4-Pro. The architecture behind the price: V4's KV cache is 100x smaller, ~3GB VRAM for 1M tokens. Qwen shipped 3.7-Max. MiniMax teased a similar move. Anthropic shipped self-hosted sandboxes and MCP tunnels for Managed Agents, /workflows in Claude Code that replaces the LLM orchestrator with code, /usage for per-component token attribution, and a first-party security plugin. Google had a week. Gemini 3.5 Flash launched at 3x input and 6x output the price of 3 Flash — Theo's math shows it costs 2x more to run than 3.1 Pro on similar tasks. Gemini Omni lost a side-by-side to Seedance 2.0. Jack Wotherspoon shipped Antigravity CLI, Philipp Schmid debuted Managed Agents in the Gemini API, and Google open-sourced Agent Executor. Cursor shipped Composer 2.5 and published CursorBench. Datacurve released DeepSWE as a harder agentic coding benchmark. Supply-chain attacks kept rolling: Mini Shai-Hulud hit antv, TrapDoor crypto stealers spread across npm/PyPI/Crates.io, Megalodon injected 5,718 commits into 5,561 GitHub repos in six hours, and GitHub itself disclosed unauthorized access to its internal repositories. Cloudflare published their experience running Anthropic's Mythos against 50 of their own repos. The MCP 2026-07-28 RC is stateless. ElevenLabs launched Music v2 and Speech Engine. Runway shipped Aleph 2.0. Accenture laid off 11,000 in an $865M AI restructuring. Exa raised $250M at $2.2B. OpenRouter raised $113M.
Watch on
Episode Transcript
Shane and Abhi are back with AI news! Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic. The OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI head said he wants to "get back to R&D" at the LLM frontier. Same week, Greg Brockman posted "the model alone is no longer the product." Elon Musk announced SpaceX is offering AI compute as a service at significant scale, with Anthropic as the flagship customer. Tom Brown confirmed Anthropic is scaling on GB200 capacity in Colossus 2 through June. Anthropic is reportedly paying SpaceX $1.25B a month — a $15B run rate to one vendor. OpenAI offered $2M in tokens to every YC startup in the current batch in exchange for equity. WorkOS launched auth.md, an open protocol for agents to register for services on the web, with Cloudflare and Firecrawl as launch partners. The Chinese labs kept pushing. DeepSeek made their 75% discount permanent on V4-Pro. The architecture behind the price: V4's KV cache is 100x smaller, ~3GB VRAM for 1M tokens. Qwen shipped 3.7-Max. MiniMax teased a similar move. Anthropic shipped self-hosted sandboxes and MCP tunnels for Managed Agents, /workflows in Claude Code that replaces the LLM orchestrator with code, /usage for per-component token attribution, and a first-party security plugin. Google had a week. Gemini 3.5 Flash launched at 3x input and 6x output the price of 3 Flash — Theo's math shows it costs 2x more to run than 3.1 Pro on similar tasks. Gemini Omni lost a side-by-side to Seedance 2.0. Jack Wotherspoon shipped Antigravity CLI, Philipp Schmid debuted Managed Agents in the Gemini API, and Google open-sourced Agent Executor. Cursor shipped Composer 2.5 and published CursorBench. Datacurve released DeepSWE as a harder agentic coding benchmark. Supply-chain attacks kept rolling: Mini Shai-Hulud hit antv, TrapDoor crypto stealers spread across npm/PyPI/Crates.io, Megalodon injected 5,718 commits into 5,561 GitHub repos in six hours, and GitHub itself disclosed unauthorized access to its internal repositories. Cloudflare published their experience running Anthropic's Mythos against 50 of their own repos. The MCP 2026-07-28 RC is stateless. ElevenLabs launched Music v2 and Speech Engine. Runway shipped Aleph 2.0. Accenture laid off 11,000 in an $865M AI restructuring. Exa raised $250M at $2.2B. OpenRouter raised $113M.